Admin: Orders

Overview

The Orders page lets store owners set the way orders are processed as well as manage a few other goodies related to orders and order management. These configurations offer fundamental settings for your shopping cart system.

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration
• Have complete understanding for how your company intends to process orders

Getting Started

There are no tasks required to proceed with this article.

Administrating Orders Settings

You can find this page in the Admin section of the control panel.

The link opens a basic configuration page for your orders.

The Orders page has several configuration options. These options are rules you set within the order process when a customer places an order from your store. If any of these rules are broken, the customer is unable to complete the order and will be warned.

Orders

Setting Name	Description
Allow 0 Dollar Orders	Check this box if you want to allow users to have orders with no price. This is useful for free items or if you have promotions that could potentially result in products being discounted by 100% intentionally.
Require Terms Agreement During Checkout	Check this box if you want to add an agreement during checkout that the user must acknowledge to complete the order.
Use Child Choices Adjustments for Bundles	Check this box if you want to specify that bundled products should use price adjustments from the individual products that are bundled together.  For example, imagine you bundle a desk and office chair together, each would potentially be choices that change their price if purchased individually - such as one color being $10 more expensive.  Checking this option will allow for that price adjustment to be applied to bundles.
Maximum Order Quantity	Set the maximum quantity number for products.  If this total quantity is exceeded by the customer, they will be warned, and the order and payment will not be placed.
Maximum Order Weight	Enter the maximum order weight allowed for an order.  If an order exceeds the total weight, the customer will be warned, and the order and payment will not be placed.
Last Order Number	Enter the next order number used to increment order numbers for all new orders.  If your last order number is 1999, then you should enter 2000 or higher.  This is useful if your store is new and you want to give the impression that it's been around for much longer, or if you want to "reset" your order numbers to reflect a change in business.  For example, all orders that use a new order workflow might be easily signaled if they were 5000 or higher.

Products

The only setting you'll find here is not directly related to orders, but rather to products.  It seems silly to create a setting page for this one check box, so you'll find this swatch setting here.  It's the next best place we could think to put it.

Setting Name	Description
Show Color Swatches for Marked Choices	Show color swatches for products with different color options.  How this setting impacts your site is discussed in much greater detail in our documentation on how to create swatches.

Shopping Cart

In Hotcakes what you might think of as a "cart" or "shopping cart" is still an order.  It just hasn't yet been placed and therefore doesn't even have an order number yet.  These settings help to manage how carts behave in your store.

Setting Name	Description
Save Shopping Cart To	This allows you to choose if you want to save a shopping cart to cookies or a session.  While the default is "Browser Cookies" you might want to change this for some stores.  Browser cookies will allow a customer to still see and work with their cart over time, provided that they use the same web browser.  If you choose "Browser Session," the customer's cart will disappear as soon as they close their web browser in any way.  From their perspective, the cart is permanently lost, which is what you might desire.
Send E-mail if Card Was Abandoned	Check this box if you want to send the customer an e-mail after abandoning a cart.  Only customers that have an account and were logged in while shopping can be contacted.  This is disabled by default.
Send Abandoned E-mail in Days	Define how many days you would like to wait before Hotcakes automatically contacts your customers about their abandoned carts.  While the default is currently 1, you might choose to e-mail customers after 3 days have passed.

Quickbooks

Hotcakes has been integrated with Quickbooks in a one-way synchronization that allows you to export order and transaction information from Hotcakes, to your Quickbooks system.  You can learn more about how to setup Quickbooks in our Quickbooks export documentation.

Setting Name	Description
Order Account	This should match the "account name" you have defined in Quickbooks to be associated with order information coming from Hotcakes.
Shipping Account	This should match the "account name" you have defined in Quickbooks to be associated with shipping information coming from Hotcakes.

Click Save Changes to save your settings.